A defended narrative uses outer defences rather
than a move structure.

Outer defence opens

The plot
opens with the beheading game bargain.

Sir Gawain
accepts the Green Knight’s challenge to a game in which
Gawain deals the Green Knight a blow with an axe and is
pledged to receive a return blow from him a year later.

Gawain
chops off the Green Knight’s head and the Knight leaves
the hall carrying his head and reminding Gawain to keep
his appointment at the Green Chapel a year later.

Outer
defence for the narrative opened. The outer
defence of the beheading bargain makes the adventure
with the lady possible. The beheading game safeguards
this adventure because it is a bargain which will be
honoured.

The adventure with the lady at Sir
Bertilak’s castle

Gawain sets
out for the Green Chapel to honour his bargain with the
Green Knight. He stays at a castle over Christmas and
the lord of the castle suggests that he and Gawain play
a game. Each evening, host and guest will exchange
whatever they have gained during the day.

On the
first day, while the lord is hunting deer in the forest,
his wife visits Gawain while he lies in bed and makes
amorous advances. Gawain resists but accepts a kiss from
her, which he exchanges for the flesh of a dismembered
deer at the end of the day. The next day, the lord hunts
a boar and, at the end of the day, Gawain exchanges two
kisses for the boar’s head. On the third day, the lord
hunts a fox, which is pursued with cries of ‘thief’, and
Gawain exchanges three kisses for the skin of the fox,
flayed alive. The lady has also given him a green girdle
which he does not declare.

The bargain
of the exchanges of winnings is a further, inner,
safeguard for the adventure: the lord of the castle
receives tokens that the hero has not been a traitor,
and his own gifts show the hero what would happen should
he be one.

Outer defence closes

On the
following day, Gawain goes to the Green Chapel, which
turns out to be a green, grassy mound. He hears the
sound of an axe being sharpened as he explores this
mound. The Green Knight appears, and Gawain flinches a
little as the axe descends; the Knight withholds the
axe, reproaching him. The next blow is a feint, and when
the Knight swings the axe a third time he only wounds
Gawain slightly on the neck.

The Green
Knight is the friendly lord of the castle, and the
slight wound is a punishment for Gawain’s concealment of
the green girdle. Gawain confesses to covetousness and
treachery before the Green Knight, and the Green Knight
tells him that he has confessed his faults fully and
done penance at the point of the axe. He is absolved of
his offence.

The
beheading game bargain is honoured and the hero is
reprieved. He has also done penance at the point of the
axe and made his confession to the Green Knight, who has
absolved him. Outer defence for the narrative closed.

It’s my argument that the text of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight includesa hidden plot in which a
forbidden adventure with a lady is safeguarded by the honouring of
two bargains. The plot constructs the safeguards out of narrative
material which supplies the necessary bargains. The honouring of the
first of these bargains – the beheading game – forms the outer
defence and the honouring of the second – the exchanges of winnings
– forms an inner one. The courtly material in the text belongs to
the Gawain-poet’s overlay, where the author adapts the ritual
material into that favourite medieval theme, the test.

The adventure with the lady is forbidden in the
plot because she belongs to someone else. She also belongs to
someone else in the overlay, but in the overlay she has come into
Gawain’s bedchamber because she is testing him, while in the plot
she is there because the hero has summoned her up. In the overlay,
she belongs to a character called Sir Bertilak de Hautdesert, while
in the plot she belongs to a figure called ‘the Green Knight’, whose
origin is a beheading bogey belonging to the primal world of the
unconscious. Ritual plots are about raw, primitive feeling, while
courtly themes are highly sophisticated and artificial: the contrast
could not be greater. In this text, where the courtly joins forces
with the primitive, Sir Bertilak plays the part of the Green Knight
and the whole scheme is blamed on Morgan le Fay, while the primitive
plot gets on with its business underneath and completes its course
with the absolution given by the beheading bogey.

So the Gawain-poet’s romance has to rub
along with a ‘hidden’ plot which inevitably conflicts with his
chivalric themes. The curious partnership, where neither narrative
knows about the other, provides a very rich text for audiences and
plenty of intriguing problems for critics. A ritual plot is always
dominant – an author cannot change its course – and its purpose is
serious, probably functional, in the brain. We may be encountering a
product of a lifelong storytelling process essential for the mind.
It might be seen as a bit of biology, but nonetheless a valuable
addition to our literature.

The task of finding out how this plot works has
to be accomplished without the help of a move structure. It was my
first defended narrative, half-way through my investigation, and the
study I made of the text early in my career was a casualty of my not
having grasped its structure. When I returned to it fifteen years
later, I stood back from the details and suddenly saw the whole
thing visually as an adventure surrounded by safeguards. This
solution has now helped me to identify other defended narratives,
where the defences take less visible forms or are only partial
structures. Defences are a difficult but important area, revealing
the amazing phenomenon of the ritual plot more clearly. Plots
construct their defences out of narrative, and in Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight there is a magnificent dual construction, two
nightmare bargains selected by unconscious thought to protect the
hero. The unconscious knows more about nightmare than consciousness
does, and its stories are among the best constructed and most
popular in the world.

In coming to my solution I was enormously helped
by the quality of the whole text, by the rich detail at both levels
of narration. There is much to learn from exploring the conflicts
between two levels of narration, and interpretation is little use
before we have accomplished this satisfactorily. Where the enigmatic
end of the romance is concerned, I had as my basic observation that
the Green Knight heard Gawain’s confession and absolved him, in
spite of Gawain’s prior confession before the priest at the castle.
Meanwhile, the confessions appear paired, cowardice with
covetousness and treachery with lack of fidelity. Cowardice and lack
of fidelity are knightly offences which must belong to the overlay,
while covetousness and treachery are the offences which commonly
appear in the ritual plots, and seem inappropriate in the Gawain-poet’s
romance. I see a significant duplication here: the matter of the
overlay and the matter of the plot appearing side by side. In my
work, such features cannot be passed over: there are indications of
a serious crime running parallel with a courtly theme of knightly
misdemeanours.

Primitive as it is, the ritual plot does have a
concern with good and evil, but this concern is part of an
unconscious world and not subjected to rational scrutiny. As such it
is dealt with by magic. An investment of power in the bargains makes
a ‘dangerous’ adventure possible, and an investment of power in the
confession and absolution at the Green Chapel removes guilt and
fear. The devices tend to be piled on; one alone is seldom enough.
There are two bargains, not one, and then the addition of a
confession and absolution described in detail. Meanwhile, the
overlay’s concern with good and evil is recognisable to the
conscious mind and dealt with by the author’s moral themes.

For a full discussion of this text, see The Magical Quest, pages 189-212.